The Jedi Temple, Coruscant, Friday

[suitably_heroic]

There was such a thing as capital-d Darkness, and then there was just darkness. The black behind Atton's eyes had been the former, at first, but as he opened his eyes, he saw the latter.

"Oh, good. You're up."

You know, there was something really off-putting about looking at your own body's face with somebody else peering back out from behind the eyes. Downright creepy, Atton'd say. "Oh," he said. "It's you."

"You could be a little happier to see me," Jaq said, sitting down on the blackness in front of him. "I'm the only thing keeping you alive right now, 'Atton'."

"Sorry. Let me drop right down to my knees and praise you," Atton muttered. Was he tied down? He felt like he should be-- but somehow his arms and legs moved just fine. "Except no, because you're a long-dead figment of my imagination."

Jaq snorted. Yeah, he looked like Atton all right - but with neater, if longer hair, a clean-shaven jaw and that stupid tight Sith assassin outfit. "I'm as dead as you are," Jaq said, "Which at the moment is 'somewhere in the middle.' Guess we did need that babysitter after all."

"No, we needed backup," Atton said. "And hey, lucky us, we got backup."

"You wanted Brianna to come."

"I'd have preferred it if Mical pulled Mira off her mission, but yeah."

Jaq's eyebrows shot up. "You forced his hand on purpose. Smart."

"No, smart would've been leaving Skywalker a message, too. I'm pretty sure I could've convinced him to indulge his heroic narcissism if I'd played it right."

"You know, for a guy who pretends not to care much, you're kind of a control freak."

"Says the guy who tortures people for the lulz."

"The what?"

"Never mind."

It was kind of weird, watching a guy pacing across perfect blackness like there was an actual solid floor beneath his feet. Atton was content to figure that one out for a couple of minutes, watching Jaq's booted feet pacing up and down, up and down. In the distance, he could still feel something burning, he realized. But reaching for it seemed like a bad idea.

"I'm not actually buying this, you know," Jaq said conversationally, his boots coming to a stop. "You're in your own head, and what are you trying to do? Pretending to have a dissociative episode? Or do you want to have a big, dramatic face-off between Light Side You and Dark Side You? You know, lightsabers flashing, cloaks swirling, screaming, melodrama..."

Atton pulled a face. "Do I look like Anakin Skywalker to you?"

Jaq shrugged. "Hey, maybe he's rubbed off," he said. "It would've been better if we'd just killed that guy when we had the chance, you know. Nobody would blame you. Well... nobody who matters, anyway."

"Yeah, yeah, kill all the Jedi, that'll fix things."

"You used to believe that."

"And I don't blame you for believing it," Atton shot back. "But that was a long time ago. Things have changed."

Those black boots appeared next to him, and Jaq squatted down. "What was the story again? A Jedi showed up and 'shot a light through my brain and killed me'? You liar."

Atton facepalmed. What else could he do? "Am I being yelled at by a hallucination from my own brain right now? Is this really happening? Why don't you scurry back off to whatever corner of my brain you've been all this time and just die already?"

"See, this is the problem with you, 'Atton'," Jaq said, looking up at the black sky. "Other people could get away with the whole, 'No, it wasn't me, it was the other guy' escapist routine, but not you. You know damn well you were me when you were a murderer at 20, and when you were a cold soldier at 18, and a stupid kid at 16, and at 10--"

Oh, space. Atton pulled his face. "Yeah, yeah, stop it, I get it, I get it already," he said, "Greatest hits of my life, all on me, lesson learned, let's get out of here--"

Pain spilled through him like a plasma leak, bubbling up and out from the inside. He cried out, dropping forward, barely catching himself on the nothingness.

"Oh, good," Jaq said, still looking up. "They're trying to peel that artifact out of your guts. Now it's a 50-50 whether we live or die. Maybe a 40-60." He looked towards Atton. "That was a stupid move, by the way."

Atton gnashed his teeth, forcing himself to get back up. First to his knees, then to his feet.

"I was going to get some of the splash anyway," he said, "and I had a better shot at making it out alive than Brianna did. It was smart."

"Of course, if you'd only gotten the splash, you definitely would have made it out alive," Jaq said. "Self-sacrifice? So very Jedi of you."

"Don't remind me," Atton muttered. He sucked in a breath. "So, this artifact... messes with people's perception of the world and themselves. Using their memories? Something like that?"

Jaq shrugged. "Don't ask me," he said, "Again, I'm you."

"Well, you're Sith me," Atton said crankily, "So don't blame me for being optimistic about you having something useful to share."

He limped across the blackness, ignoring the pain. He needed... this was his head. He needed to sit. So he needed to focus, make somewhere to sit. "I can't just keep falling back into this stuff," he muttered, largely to himself. "I can't leave these doors open for every idiot with a dark side fetish to come marching into my head."

"Compared to most people, your head is an impenetrable prison already." How was it Jaq was sitting? That was him. Ugh. "We saw to that."

"It's not the same, okay?" Screw it. Atton collapsed back down on the ground, ass-first. It hurt, but that just took away his attention from the parts that really hurt. "There's all this stuff in my head and ignoring it doesn't help, and talking to Skywalker clearly doesn't help or I wouldn't be here--"

The blackness flickered, gave way to white, snow, sky... and then it vanished again. Atton gestured angrily. "This! I need this out of my head!"

"Well, that's not going to happen," Jaq said, stretching his legs out. "So maybe you need to stop lashing out and just accept it already. Crazy thought, I know."

"Nobody asked you," Atton muttered.

He shut his eyes. Capital-D Darkness was looking like a whole lot more fun all of a sudden.

---

Emotion, yet peace.
Ignorance, yet knowledge.
Passion, yet serenity.
Chaos, yet harmony.
Death, yet the Force.
Emotion, yet...

A flush of cold air struck Atton in the face, and he shivered. It was the first sensation he'd felt in some time that wasn't pain or nothingness. It sucked, but he was grateful for it.

Kind of the opposite of another kolto decanting a few months ago, but he was not going to linger on that. Too much.

"Force be with us," Mical sighed. Some of the tension flooded from his features.

"Yeah, yeah," Atton mumbled around the terrible taste of straight-up kolto still lingering in his mouth, "Told you I'd be okay."

Mical's eyes darted to Brianna's. "It was rather touch-and-go for a while," he said. "We had to remove another shard of the Sith artifact from you after we found it was blocking your healing."

Blah, blah, blah. Atton staggered to a seat in the medical bay and collapsed into it. "But it's out, right?" he checked. "I mean... I don't think I'm hallucinating. Of course, if I am, then I'm also hallucinating it if you say it's all out, and..."

"You are not hallucinating," Visas told him firmly. She was standing several feet away, the Miraluka boy sitting next to her on the floor.

The chart in Mical's hands drew all of the man's attention for a moment. "You might be feeling the effects for some time," he said. "The artifact functioned as a kind of poison of the dark side--"

"I know," Atton said.

He looked around. Brianna seemed fine, except she was missing her usual scowl. Nothing was wrong with Visas, or the boy, whatever his name was again. "So we're all good?"

Mical smiled at him over the chart. "Outside of your injuries, yes. And we appear to have acquired a new Padawan learner."

"I will be training the boy," Visas said softly. "He was trapped in that cave for a long time, but he has escaped being touched by the dark side too heavily. He is strong in the Force."

"Okay," Atton muttered. He shut his eyes and found, to his relief, there was nothing lurking behind his eyelids. "So... anyone want to go pick up some sliders?"

If he sounded merry but exhausted when he largely just felt exhausted, well, that was a lie nobody was going to call him on, right?

---

"The code you mention is the Jedi Code," Mical said. "Or at least half of it. The Jedi Code was... expanded to the one we now practice during the early Manderon period, and modern applications usually skip over the line about chaos in either iteration..."

"Funny," Atton said. "That one was my favorite."

He rubbed at his face. It'd been almost a day since surgery and getting out of the kolto tank, but he still didn't feel quite right. Not the same not-quite-right as before; he was pretty sure everything he was seeing right now was real. But whatever that artifact had done to him while he was asleep, it had done a real number of it.

Mical looked sympathetic. "Should I leave you be?" he said. "There's no reason for you to be up and about already. You can use the rest."

"Nah," Atton said, barely peeling himself out of his seat. "I have things to do-- crystals to find, a new lightsaber to build, a tattoo parlor to find..."

That earned him a squint. "Atton," Mical said, "Are you sure that is wise--"

"Yeah," Atton said. "'Chaos, but harmony', right? Gets skipped over a lot because it's weird, even in the current edition? Sounds like me." He shot Mical a glance. "Thanks for stitching me back together, though," he said. "Hope you can manage the same for the jacket."

"Just be careful," Mical said.

"Never am, but thanks." Atton stretched and felt something pull badly on his chest. Ugh. "Space," he said. "That being said... Please promise me we won't be mopping up Dark Jedi for the rest of our lives?"

"I didn't think you were planning to stay with us for that long," Mical replied, raising an eyebrow. He didn't look disapproving, however.

Atton shrugged fake-casually as he tugged on the Jal Shey armor - one of the few pieces of clothing he had left from their merry Sith space tour that weren't tailored to fit under a jacket that was currently a wreck. "Hey, I'm full of surprises."

[[ nfb, nfi, just some epilogue-y stuff, but casual mentions of atton's past wrt murder and torture under the cut. thus ends my exercise in getting atton stuff out of my head. ]]